Margaret, though — could she ever admit it to herself? — was not inclined to hurry after Bella’s grandparents. To catch up with them was to relinquish the child, and that was something she was not impatient to do. It might have crossed her mind during the previous few days how joyful it would be to have a child of her own — this child. The thought of stealing Bella away might have stained her daydreams briefly. But Margaret would never actually have done it. It would have been wicked. She would have felt guilty to her grave. No matter that the immediate parents were dead or missing, or that the grandparents were selfish and uncaring, or that Margaret would provide the girl with a kinder future. The theft of a child was unforgivable, even though the ties of every family in the land were already hanging loose.

But for the moment, now that Bella seemed to have been delivered freely to her by the adversities of travel, Margaret did not feel wicked in the least. Or even compromised. She was not stealing a child. She was merely being slow. Anyway, she told herself, the grandparents had made their own decisions — good ones, possibly — and they had willingly abandoned Bella, or at the very least relinquished her. Margaret had kept to the rendezvous. Margaret had returned the child to the promised place. It was the Boses who had walked away, heartbroken, no doubt, but of their own free will. They probably had not believed that their son’s daughter would show up again after such a prolonged and baffling absence. They would have shed tears. They would have argued about what was best to do. But in the end they must have felt that they had little choice but to protect themselves and press on with their journey. Already they would be getting used to the loss of their granddaughter. They were not to blame. Hard times make stones of us all.

So Margaret did not hurry on to catch up with the grandparents. She dawdled. She persuaded herself that her first duty was to feed Bella with some stolen milk and mashed white of egg. Then she had to feed herself with cheese and Bella’s yolk. Then there was her blanket to be wrung out and her possessions to pack.

She realized at once, when she lifted up her back sack, that it was emptier than it ought to be. There was a water bag inside. There was the died-back mint, still in its pot. Her comb and hairbrush had not been touched. There was the spark stone and the fishing net, which Andrew Bose had dismissed as “the work of ten thumbs.” But her taffies and her scraps of food were missing. So was Franklin’s knife. Margaret dug into her clothes and checked each item, getting increasingly annoyed and upset when she could not find what she was looking for. The green-and-orange woven top that her sister had made for her and that she loved and wore only for best was not inside. Margaret hissed to herself. She could imagine Melody Bose wearing it as if it were her own. She muttered out loud a thought she knew was hollow, but because the theft of her clothes had come before the keeping of the child, it allowed her to feel that what she was about to do was justified, if only thinly — that her top was payment for the girl, a fair exchange. So now, in Margaret’s readjusted view, the Boses were not innocent. They were to blame, after all. They had brought this loss, this separation, on themselves. They’d crept away like thieves, abandoning their blood.

“I’ll love you, though,” she said to Bella, and pressed her own wet face against the child’s.

Twelve

The narrow country path preferred by Margaret soon joined a wider and more regular track, with way markers and mounting blocks for riders. Her route became a little busier and then much busier, and not only with emigrants heading eastward and impatient for the first hint of a salty wind. There were farmworkers with baskets of produce and barrowmen with sacks of late-season silage for sale and trappers going into town to trade in hides and tallow, hogs and fur. There were unhurried horsemen with panniers of goods and children riding backsaddle, and hurried horsemen riding in and out with documents and messages, taking little care to avoid pedestrians and the droves of sheep and goats destined for the slitter’s knife. There were journeymen — weavers, skinners, coopers, carpenters, wagon makers, shoemakers, hatters — with tools, and bands of hired hands, all competing for a day’s labor, as well as beggars, hucksters, and salesmen waylaying anyone who was unlucky enough to catch their eye. Please help. Please buy. Please give.

The only travelers who were not pursued by the pesterers were a pair of what appeared to be, according to the loop of white tape tied across their shoulders, Baptist pilgrims, looking as beyond reproach as they could. Baptists never helped or bought or gave, so they were rarely bothered. They’d freely pray for anyone and express their pity. But prayer makes the weakest soup. And pity doesn’t settle any bills.

Everyone on that wide road was going to or coming from Tidewater, a town that had to be passed by anyone hoping to escape America from those flat quarters of the coast. It was the sort of busy and attentive place where you would find it hard to travel faster than the news of your coming. Beyond Tidewater’s buildings and beyond its double set of defensive walls, the ground sloped gently to the scrub-covered shores of the estuary, so much slower and broader than the river at Ferrytown, browner too, and turbid with silt. For once the groups of emigrants were outnumbered by people who had not yet decided to depart from their birth country but who, like the residents of Margaret’s town had been, were more attracted by the prospects of local wealth and consequence than by the distant promises of life across the ocean.

The first stranger to hold Margaret’s eye, despite her best efforts to hide her face, was a nut-brown man carrying two geese in a basket. He put on a show of admiring Bella, though he didn’t try to hold her fingers or touch her cheek as true admirers would. Margaret had to lean close to hear what he was saying. He had what was known as a Carolina twang, that is, a way of speaking that suggested words were rubbery and could be bent and stretched, though only once he’d softened them with chewing.

“Your boy’s very sweet,” he said, cooing theatrically but mistaking both the child’s gender and her parentage. “What’s the little fella’s name?”

“His name is Jackson,” Margaret said. Why not, indeed? Better not to give the child’s actual name in case the Boses were inquiring thereabouts.

“Now that’s a good old Yankee name.”

“His father was a good old Yankee man.”

“You don’t want to buy a good old Yankee goose, by any chance? A fine and meaty bird.” He pointed at the smaller of the two.

She laughed. “Is it fine and meaty enough to take us on its back and fly us east, across the sea, and put us down in some safe place?”

“She would have been, if I hadn’t clipped her wings. She lays five eggs a day.”

“And if I buy your obliging goose, where should I go with her? Where can we spend the night, within a day’s walking from here? Can you suggest a winter lodging place if we don’t make it for a sailing?”

She was not sure, but Margaret understood the goose man to say, “The Ark’s ahead, on the far side of the town. You could be there by this afternoon. There’s always work to be had in there and food for free, if you can settle for the rules and do your bit. Though there’re no eggs or geese in there, as far as I’ve been told. Best get one now.”

“Did you say ark?” she asked. She didn’t recognize the word.

“The Blessed Ark. It’s where the Finger Baptists live. It’s safe, at least. You’ll not be touched.” The man laughed, as if he’d made an unusually clever joke. “No, that’s for sure. You’ll not be touched in there.”